Friday, 16 September 2016

How 'Brainwave-Balancing' Therapy Could Ease Migraines!

Credit: Human brain image via Shutterstock
A new type of therapy that uses sound waves to "balance" people's brain
activity might help lower blood pressure and reduce symptoms of
migraines, early research suggests.
The therapy is known as HIRREM, which stands for high-resolution,
relational, resonance-based, electroencephalic mirroring. For the treatment,
patients place sensors — which measure the brain's electrical activity,
or brainwaves — on their scalp. The sensors are used to detect whether
there are imbalances in the brain's activity between the left and right
sides of the brain.
Such imbalances can reflect improper regulation of the autonomic nervous system
— the system that's responsible for controlling unconscious bodily
functions, such as breathing and heart rate, the researchers said.
A computer then identifies the dominant (or most prominent) brain
frequencies, and a software program coverts these brain frequencies into
auditory tones, which are played back in real time. Patients listen to
these sounds through headphones.
The researchers call these sounds a "reflection" of the brain's
activity. They say that the brain can recognize that the tones reflect
what is going on in the organ. Once a patient starts hearing the tones,
"the electrical pattern tends to shift towards improved balance," study
co-author Hossam Shaltout, an assistant professor in the Hypertension
and Vascular Research Center at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North
Carolina, said in a statement.
In one small study, the researchers tested HIRREM on 10 men and women with high blood pressure.
They underwent about 18 HIRREM sessions over 10 days, after which their
average systolic blood pressure was reduced from 152 to 136 millimeters
of mercury (mm Hg), and their average diastolic pressure was reduced
from 97 to 81 mmHg. (Systolic blood pressure is the "top" number in a
blood pressure reading and diastolic pressure is the "bottom" number.)
The participants' heart rate variability — which is a measure of the
variations in the interval between heartbeats — increased, on average,
from 43 to 57 milliseconds. This is a good outcome, because it means
that the body has more flexibility to change heart rate in response to
blood pressure, Shaltout said.
In another study, 52 adults with migraines
underwent about 16 HIRREM sessions over nine days. At the end of the
study, participants reported improvements in their headache symptoms.
Because the findings are preliminary and the studies are small, more
research is needed to confirm the results, and to determine the ways in
which the therapy could be working, the researchers said.
Dr. Kevin Weber, a neurologist and headache specialist at The Ohio
State University Wexner Medical Center, who was not involved in the
studies, pointed out that neither of these studies included a control
group, or a group that received a placebo or "dummy" treatment. The
inclusion of a control group is important, because it's possible that
the results were due to the placebo effect, Weber said. A placebo effect
is one that results from people's belief that the treatment works,
rather than from any physiological effect of the treatment.
"I think it is a promising technology," Weber said. However, more
research is needed "to make sure that it actually works, as opposed to
just being a placebo effect," Weber said.
In 2013, the same group of researchers did conduct a smaller migraine
study that included a control group. In that study, which was presented
at the 2013 International Headache Congress in Boston, 16 people
received the HIRREM treatment and 14 people received a placebo
treatment. For the placebo treatment, the participants heard randomly
generated musical tones, as opposed to tones that reflected their
brainwaves.
The study showed that after the treatments, the likelihood of
experiencing a headache was about the same in both groups. But this
could have been because the study was too small to detect a meaningful
difference between the groups, the researchers said.
Migraines are thought to be caused by abnormalities in the electrical
activity of the brain, so it's possible that a treatment like HIRREM,
which alters the brain's electrical activity, could affect migraines,
Weber said. And the brain and nervous system also play a role in the
regulation of blood pressure, so it's possible that HIRREM could have an
effect on blood pressure as well, he said.
The researchers also noted that patients in the blood pressure study
experienced reduced symptoms of insomnia and anxiety, which might also
have an effect on blood pressure.
The studies will be presented this week at the American Heart
Association's Council on Hypertension 2016 Scientific Sessions in
Orlando. The HIRREM technology is a product of the company Brain State
Technologies, which is based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Researchers at Wake
Forest School of Medicine have been evaluating HIRREM
since 2011, with funding mainly from non-industry sources.
The two new
studies were funded by The Susanne Marcus Collins Foundation.

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